Author: Ed Jacobs

Saturday, December 11, 2021

The semester now (just) past has brought so much; re-establishing at work in-person, a very new routine re work, commuting, my fundamental relationship with where I work and the people I work with. Home, which is lovely, is so very different than this time a year ago. In time, I’ll try to capture some of these things as I return to this journal after a three-month long hiatus.

At this moment, Pattie and I are in Roatan, Honduras. We arrived yesterday, picked up and brought to Cocoview. Very, very helpful folks here got us an orientation to the dive operation–a required step before being allowed to begin doing the regular boat diving. It was a very helpful session for just Pattie and me, showing us how everything runs (some logistical systems in place which seem very logical, but definitely new to us), as well as the diving immediately around Cocoview. We got in a 40-minute dive which allowed the divemaster to check our weighting, buoyancy, etc.

When we got to our accommodations, we were a bit surprised. As we booked this a bit last-minute, all the cabins on the main property were already taken; so they put us in a “beach house on the adjoining property.” We’re about a 5-minute walk to the main area (dive operation, dining hall, etc.). And it’s wonderful.

Perhaps I should have edited out the first image, but it’s really so very perfect here.

Now, as I write this, I’m sipping coffee while sitting on this very large screened-in porch, facing our little beach, watching the sunrise. Another morning where I find myself extraordinarily fortunate, experiencing a slice of a perfect moment in a gorgeous place.

The breeze here on the porch is delightful; and the air conditioning in the bedroom last night was just perfect and quiet. It’s almost 6am now, the time Pattie asked me to wake her, so I’ll sign off so that she can get to enjoy some of this morning porch-coffee before our day begins with breakfast and an 8:30 dive.

December 11, 2021
Monday, September 6, 2021

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, an ode to Labor Day

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-5-2021

September 6, 2021
Saturday, September 4, 2021

September 6, 2021
Saturday, August 7, 2021

On Friday, we again slept in a bit, then got in our truck and headed out to find a dive site highly recommended–“Something Special,” just south of us. We didn’t find it, and just continued south to explore further. It was a day when we did dive–eventually hitting “The Lake” dive site–but also just got out of the resort and started to get a sense of the broader island.

We drove south, past the salt mining center (will post pix of salt pond, salt piles, and the pier which loads ships with salt), the southern tip of the island (lighthouse), and up the eastern side. The waters are considerably more rough on the windward side, the east, and it’s easy to see why there really aren’t any dive sites indicated on the map’s eastern shore.

We passed an area just past the southern tip which was filled with kite surfers, and a host of folks teaching kite surfing. We see kite surfers in Surf City, and there’s something quite beautiful about watching these big, beautifully colored kites propelling surfers along the water’s surface.

A bit further along was a little resort area on the eastern coast, and that little resort is in an isolated bay where their focus is wind surfing. We stopped in there on our drive post-dive just to get some water. And seeing the shore filled with sun-bathers and those learning and practicing wind-surfing was just another flavor of the island. This resort, judging by the language predominant in the bar area, is almost entirely Dutch.

We kept driving as the road now turned west, crossing the island back towards the main city of Kralendijk, then north to our spot at Buddy Dive Resort. Most of the ride was pretty desolate, but everywhere there is evidence of building projects in process. Most of those projects seem to have stalled, but it’s hard to know, to be honest, as there is equipment on these sites, just not active at the moment.

_____

I’m going to spend a bit of time this morning downloading images from the GoPro, and I hope things came out well enough to share here…so I’ll get to that now.

August 8, 2021
Friday, August 6, 2021

Last Wednesday, very early morning, Pattie and I departed RDU for a thrice-postponed trip to Bonaire. So we’re on an island in the Netherlands Caribbean, just north of Venezuela, near sister islands of Aruba and Curacao. We have been to Aruba before, and at that time we were neither scuba diving, nor aware of the wonders of Bonaire’s rich reef ecology.

Bonaire is reknowned as a diver’s paradise, and that’s why we’ve come here. We’re staying at a “dive resort,” which means that they seriously cater to divers’ needs, supply unlimited tanks of commonly used gas mixtures (air and enhanced oxygen “nitrox”), and provide a truck and hearty breakfast.

There are lots of options for boat dives, but this island is really known for the many (about sixty) shore dives. That is, after gearing up you walk into the water from the shore, put on your fins, and off you go. On the map below, see the many shore dive sites marked with red circles:

And one of the best sites on the island (at least according to a few folks around) is the “house reef” right here at Buddy Dive. As per their requirements on this protected natural marine park (the entire island) we’re asked to do our first dive here on site to assure we’re properly weighted and can avoid bumping into the reef life on the ocean floor.

On Thursday, we slept in after Wednesday’s long travel day, then had breakfast and went on down to get in a dive. Just lovely; so much so that after a bit of a rest we went back for a second dive on the house reef. Teeming with life, with colorful fish of all sizes, and most remarkable to me is the variety of coral life.

August 6, 2021
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
Jackson’s now two (plus a week), and his little brother’s just two months away from arrival. Some pictures of the little guy on the days around/on his birthday:
August 4, 2021
Monday, July 19, 2021

“Live Every Voice,” commonly known as the Black National Anthem.
James Weldon Johnson (words), J. Rosamund Johnson (music)

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.

__________

An excellent piece, highly recommended, providing lots of context on this song, is here via Radio Lab.

And for a different context, a purely musical one, listen (beginning at about 11.30) to Jon Batiste on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. The joy of his music-making is just astounding, virtuosic, and breath-taking, so I strongly recommend listening to the entire interview.

July 19, 2021

Sunday, July 18, 2021

No better reading today than this entry in the series by

July 17, 2021 Heather Cox RichardsonJul 18
A year ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at 80 years old. As a young adult, Lewis was a “troublemaker,” breaking the laws of his state: the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and Black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.
An adherent of the philosophy of nonviolence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 24 times. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC—pronounced “snick”), he helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., told more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. Just 23 years old, Lewis spoke at the march. Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.
To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the lawbreaking protesters who were disrupting the “peace” of the South. But what seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were, in fact, changing minds. Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson honored those changing ideas when he went on TV to support the marchers and call for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented.
When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, just 6.7 percent of Black voters in Mississippi were registered to vote. Two years later, almost 60% of them were. In 1986, those new Black voters helped to elect Lewis to Congress. He held the seat until he died, winning reelection 16 times.
Now, just a year after Representative Lewis’s death, the voting rights for which he fought are under greater threat than they have been since 1965. After the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision of the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by taking away Department of Justice supervision of election changes in states with a history of racial discrimination, Republican-dominated state legislatures began to enact measures that would cut down on minority voting.
At Representative Lewis’s funeral, former President Barack Obama called for renewing the Voting Rights Act. “You want to honor John?” he said. “Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.” Instead, after the 2020 election, Republican-dominated legislatures ramped up their effort to skew the vote in their favor by limiting access to the ballot. As of mid-June 2021, 17 states had passed 28 laws making it harder to vote, while more bills continue to move forward.
Then, on July 1, by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court handed down Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, saying that the state of Arizona did not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act when it passed laws that limited ballot delivery to voters, family members, or caregivers, or when it required election officials to throw out ballots that voters had cast in the wrong precincts by accident.
The fact that voting restrictions affect racial or ethnic groups differently does not make them illegal, Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote.”
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a blistering dissent, in which Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined. “If a single statute represents the best of America, it is the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan wrote, “It marries two great ideals: democracy and racial equality. And it dedicates our country to carrying them out.” She explained, “The Voting Rights Act is ambitious, in both goal and scope. When President Lyndon Johnson sent the bill to Congress, ten days after John Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he explained that it was “carefully drafted to meet its objective—the end of discrimination in voting in America.” It gave every citizen “the right to an equal opportunity to vote.”
“Much of the Voting Rights Act’s success lay in its capacity to meet ever-new forms of discrimination,” Kagan wrote. Those interested in suppressing the vote have always offered “a non-racial rationalization” even for laws that were purposefully discriminatory. Poll taxes, elaborate registration regulations, and early poll closings were all designed to limit who could vote but were defended as ways to prevent fraud and corruption, even when there was no evidence that fraud or corruption was a problem. Kagan noted that the Arizona law permitting the state to throw out ballots cast in the wrong precinct invalidated twice as many ballots cast by Indigenous Americans, Black Americans, and Hispanic Americans as by whites.“
The majority’s opinion mostly inhabits a law-free zone,” she wrote.
Congress has been slow to protect voting rights. Although it renewed the Voting Rights Act by an overwhelming majority in 2006, that impulse has disappeared. In March 2021, the House of Representatives passed the For the People Act on which Representative Lewis had worked, a sweeping measure that protects the right to vote, removes dark money from politics, and ends partisan gerrymandering. Republicans in the Senate killed the bill, and Democrats were unwilling to break the filibuster to pass it alone.
An attempt simply to restore the provision of the Voting Rights Act gutted in 2013 has not yet been introduced, although it has been named: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Only one Republican, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, has signed on to the bill.
Yesterday, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), was arrested with eight other protesters in the Hart Senate Office Building for demanding legislation to protect voting rights.
After her arrest, Beatty tweeted: “You can arrest me. You can’t stop me. You can’t silence me.”
Last June, Representative Lewis told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart that he was “inspired” by last summer’s peaceful protests in America and around the world against police violence. “It was so moving and so gratifying to see people from all over America and all over the world saying through their action, ‘I can do something. I can say something,’” Lewis told Capehart. “And they said something by marching and by speaking up and speaking out.”
Capehart asked Lewis “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

—-Notes:
Capehart: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/10/john-lewis-black-lives-matter-protesters-give-until-you-cannot-give-any-more/https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2021-07-02/17-states-have-passed-restrictive-voting-laws-this-year-report-says

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf

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July 18, 2021

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Read this:

Dear Tucker Carlson

July 10, 2021
Friday, July 9, 2021
The construction behind us continues to move along at an impressive pace:
July 9, 2021